Social media and digital platforms played a massive role in Indonesia’s historic presidential election earlier this month. With the official result still out, I talked to Asian Internet scholar Merlyna Lim about how Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and innovative open-sourced platforms for crowdsourcing election monitoring and the vote count made this election unique.

A few highlights of our conversation:

Of 255 million citizens in Indonesia (which makes it the world’s third largest democracy) there are over 77 million citizens online — and 50 million of those are eligible to vote. There’s a very active social media landscape in Indonesia, and the social media activism community there is particularly vibrant. Continue reading →

Plato once said, “In politics we presume that everyone who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state. When we are ill…we do not ask for the handsomest physician, or the most eloquent one.”

Shall we argue against Plato? Of course he is correct. But in the ancient Greek where Plato lived there was also no television, let alone social media. Continue reading →

Drawing on empirical cases from Indonesia, this article offers a critical approach to the promise of social media activism by analysing the complexity and dynamics of the relationship between social media and its users. Rather than viewing social media activism as the harbinger of social change or dismissing it as mere “slacktivism,” the article provides a more nuanced argument by identifying the conditions under which participation in social media might lead to successful political activism. In social media, networks are vast, content is overly abundant, attention spans are short, and conversations are parsed into diminutive sentences. For social media activism to be translated into populist political activism, it needs to embrace the principles of the contemporary culture of consumption: light package, headline appetite and trailer vision. Social media activism is more likely to successfully mobilise mass support when its narratives are simple, associated with low risk actions and congruent with dominant meta-narratives, such as nationalism and religiosity. Success is less likely when the narrative is contested by dominant competing narratives generated in mainstream media.

Interested to read a full version of the article?

For those who have access from the university library, please download here (I share it online in my website but I also would like to push Taylor & Francis to give free access — if my article has a very high readership it’s more likely they’ll give free access).

For those who are not affiliated with any university, please download here for a free e-print.

“… In grappling with multiple identities and multiple realities, the reality of everyday life is experienced as reality par excellence. Micro narratives that are closer to the everyday life experience are embraced more openly, resulting in the plurality of voices, allowing for differences, nuances, and even counter-hegemonic voices. The closer to home the issue resonates, the more conversations take place. Life is local, even in the global blogosphere.” Continue reading →

Based on “Media Concentration” section in on the Media report I posted earlier, I generated several maps of media concentration below. The updated section on Media Ownership can be downloadable from here.

This time I want to share the work of some Indonesian scholars who wrote on social implications of ICTs in Indonesia — not my own work — published in the special issue of the Internetworking Indonesia Journal.

I’m pleased to present this special issue: the unique contribution of Indonesian scholars to Indonesian Internet studies!

Update by definition is ‘the act or an instance of bringing something up to date’ or ‘information that updates something’. No, I am not interested in updating you all with anything new in my life. As always, you’d never get any personal stories/gossip from my blog, OK? *smile*. Continue reading →